Sybil Brand: It’s Still Life Without Freedom : Problems at County Women’s Jail Echo Those Heard Throughout Prison System

The more than 2,000 inmates at Sybil Brand Institute, Los Angeles County’s only jail for women, had settled into uneasy sleep one night last month when sheriff’s deputies roused the maximum-security residents in Cell Block 5200.

After marching the women into a hallway and patting them down, deputies searched their living quarters, confiscating personal items--an unfinished blanket being knitted by one woman, candy bars and cigarettes, shampoo, letters (“excess mail”)--as well as mattresses and uniforms, one inmate recalls.

“Fire hazards”--photographs and magazine cutouts that the women had put up to personalize their cells--were torn off walls.

“All they told us was that we were overdue for a search,” said the woman, who has since been released. Jail authorities refused a reporter’s request to interview women held in that cell block.

Asked what the search turned up, Sheriff’s Lt. Jim Mulvihill said jail records do not show a search of Cell Block 5200 on the date given by the inmate.

“But (such) searches are conducted routinely . . . once a month at most,” Mulvihill said. “We’re always looking for something--we may have specific information--and we’re also after contraband. . . . We find altered razors, candy above and beyond what they’re permitted and excess linens, things like that. They hoard towels and blankets.”

In the view of inmates who later contacted The Times, the raid was another example of the arbitrary and unreasonable treatment that recently prompted them to stage small-scale hunger strikes and to try to form an inmate advisory committee to handle complaints, settle disputes and work for better conditions.

“They (sheriff’s deputies) threaten to take away the phones if we’re loud or not acting (as if we feel) absolutely miserable,” one inmate complained.

“I’ve seen girls stood up against the wall for an hour and a half for minor infractions,” the woman added, “like a deputy not liking the way a girl looked at them, talking or laughing in the meal line or waiting for your partner. They (the deputies) can pull you out of line, which means you lose your meal.”

Los Angeles County Municipal Judge Terry Smerling, who as a public interest lawyer in the late 1970s represented Sybil Brand inmates in a class-action lawsuit against the county, added: “The inmates are (treated like) girls. . . . No forceful personality, no ego (is tolerated). They’ve got to be submissive.”

The inmates won some points in their suit, Smerling said, such as the rights to receive reading material in the mail, to be allowed to eat with knives and forks and to be included in work furlough programs just as male prisoners are.

The court also held unconstitutional Sheriff’s Department practices such as denying access to telephones and the library and routinely classifying pretrial inmates as maximum security. And an appeals court later ruled that inmates could not be disciplined by being separated from the rest of the jail population without a hearing.

But Smerling said the women lost in their efforts to be allowed physical contact with family members, to spend more time outdoors, to be provided with better medical care and to have male deputies prohibited from stripping female inmates who are violent or disturbed.

Although jail conditions have improved somewhat since then, today’s inmates still complain of overcrowding, cockroaches, arbitrary rules, inedible food, 15-minute meal periods, no more than three hours a week of outdoor recreation and inadequate medical care.

Inmates complain that they are not allowed to touch their children when they visit or to keep newborn infants with them (155 inmates are pregnant) and that family and friends routinely must wait several hours (as long as seven hours on weekends) for a 20-minute visit during which they talk by telephone while viewing each other through a glass partition.

“You can never hug or kiss your kids,” said one former inmate, whose children are 8 and 10 years old. “And it really upset mine when they couldn’t get to me.”

They also complain about strip searches, limits on their access to both the law library and the beauty shop, and what they view as occasional brutality by sheriff’s deputies, most of whom are women, too.

“It’s by far the worst of the four jails I’ve been in,” said a woman who recently spent a month at Sybil Brand on a federal parole violation.

But the woman in charge of Sybil Brand, Capt. Helena Ashby, said the mere fact that “the jail runs and runs humanely” at more than double its capacity is no mean feat. Nearly 2,200 women are crammed into a 23-year-old yellow cement building in what the state says is space for only 910.

“We do have drugs . . . sex . . . and violence in the jail,” Ashby admitted, “but females have always managed. This facility is viewed differently (from men’s jails), although we are more overcrowded than any other (jail) in the county.” The Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail, for example, has more inmates--nearly 9,000--which is above, but not double, its 5,800 capacity.

There is even a genteel--some might say “feminine”--quality to the jail: A rose garden, airy classrooms opening onto a grassy recreation area with exercise bicycles, simple pastel uniforms, a well-stocked library, clean dormitories and young female deputies.

And the jail is headed by a woman--a 22-year veteran of the Sheriff’s Department and a former deputy at Sybil Brand. A striking dresser who wears high heels and shuns uniforms, the 41-year-old Ashby earned a master’s degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1983 (while on educational leave) before assuming command at Sybil Brand.

However, several defense attorneys and public interest lawyers interviewed by The Times said much about Sybil Brand is “window dressing.”

They contended that pretrial prisoners often do not have access to its more pleasant areas because the Sheriff’s Department often classifies inmates as requiring “maximum-security” precautions when the need to limit their movement and interaction with other inmates has not been shown.

And they pointed out that there are more inmates than space in the classes offered--typing, sewing, cosmetology, tile-setting, English, parenting, office skills, computers, reading and high school equivalency.

However, none of the more than 20 attorneys and inmates who spoke with a reporter about conditions at the women’s jail described conditions as dismal as those reported at the California Institution for Women at Frontera, the state’s only prison for long-term female felons, or at Men’s Central Jail.

Most of the women held at Sybil Brand are awaiting trial or sentencing; about one-third have already been convicted and sentenced to less than a year on misdemeanor charges. They vary from prostitutes and narcotics violators to high-publicity defendants such as, recently, accused child molester Peggy McMartin Buckey and convicted Russian spy Svetlana Ogorodnikova. Some are federal or state prisoners, and many are booked directly into Sybil Brand by police throughout the county, due to the lack of holding cells for women in most areas.

Overcrowding, Understaffing

Most of Sybil Brand’s problems, Ashby says, stem from overcrowding and understaffing.

One dormitory, for example, contains 180 beds, in rows of double bunks, and six toilets. More bunk beds fill the day rooms and line the aisles, called “freeways” in jail parlance, outside individual cells. The women must store personal items in cardboard boxes under their beds. Privacy is non-existent, lights stay on all night, and during the day the noise is sometimes deafening: Rock radio over the public address system, televisions blaring from the day rooms, and restless inmates milling about, talking and smoking, while those with “graveyard shift” work assignments try to sleep through it all.

(Mentally disturbed or dangerous inmates are housed in individual cells, and those whose behavior is disruptive are transferred to an “adjustment center” cell block where all privileges are lifted.)

In such an overcrowded setting, fights erupt periodically, although actual physical injuries are infrequent. Mulvihill said there are an average of 30 to 35 “altercations” a month between inmates, while incidents involving inmates and deputies run less than one or two a month.

Women identified as aggressively sexual are segregated, and Ashby says she has had only one report of a homosexual group rape since taking command. There has been one attempted escape in the past three years, she said, and one serious suicide attempt.

Drugs continue to be a problem, however. In the past, women smuggled narcotics in their underwear; now even bras and underpants are jail-issued.

Visitors sometimes stash drugs in the visiting rooms or toss balls containing drugs into areas where inmate cleaning crews can find them, and inmates sometimes bring drugs with them when they return from court appearances. Ashby said her staff searches the dorms frequently, watches for symptoms of drug use and conducts body cavity searches before placing women among the general population.

Officials hope that the scheduled transfer of about 500 sentenced prisoners to the new Mira Loma female honor ranch in Lancaster in September will ease the pressures, but Ashby said it will hardly dent the overpopulation.

“It will be nicer for the sentenced inmates, but it doesn’t solve the problem we have here,” she said, noting that even with 500 fewer inmates, her jail will still have to hold nearly twice its capacity.

And the transfer has its downside, too: “Here we make all our clothes, do all the cooking, all the cleaning, all the laundry, all the painting, all the tiling and run the infirmary,” she said. Sentenced prisoners work to get good time (shortened prison terms) and essentially run the jail themselves. The transfer will mean 500 fewer such workers.

Sybil Brand is staffed by 155 deputies, all but 14 of whom are women; 14 sergeants, half of whom are women, and six lieutenants, two of whom are women. The deputies are young and enthusiastic women fresh out of the academy, and a two-year jail duty, at a starting salary of about $2,200 a month, is generally their first assignment.

Praise for Deputies

Ashby praises her deputies--whose number has not increased in at least 12 years--for giving “110% every day just to get done what they have to do” and says they are dedicated and tireless. The deputies work a total of more than 2,500 hours of overtime each month, she said.

But some inmates contend that the deputies are hostile and antagonistic, going overboard to exercise their authority. One inmate, who said she has been in Sybil Brand several times, claimed that deputies overreact to squabbling inmates. She claimed that on one occasion she witnessed male deputies breaking up a fight by jumping on inmates with such force that that “I heard the bones breaking.” She did not elaborate on the alleged incident.

Others say physical brutality is rare, but that the women are treated rudely and in ways that strike where they are most vulnerable: “Instead of saying, ‘Quieten down, ladies,’ ” one inmate said, “they tell us to shut up or they’ll take our personal things away.”

Such complaints may be made by inmates through several routes, including writing directly to the jail captain. Ashby said each is logged and usually assigned to lieutenant watch commanders for investigation.

During a recent tour of the jail with a reporter, Ashby was handed a long, handwritten letter by an inmate; another slipped a note addressed to her under under a guardroom door. One, she said, was a petition from a group of prisoners who wanted to form an inmate advisory committee; Ashby said there is no need for such a group because most of the women are incarcerated for brief periods.

Ashby promised to look into some complaints, but told a reporter that others had no immediate solution:

- The cockroaches, she said, are water bugs that thrive in the water pipes. Recent plumbing work dislodged them, and they are proving resistant even to weekly exterminators.

- Physical contact between inmates and visitors, including their own children, is unlikely to be allowed for security reasons. Asked why exceptions could not be made for women who agreed to submit to searches afterward, Ashby said, “We don’t have the facilities to search.”

- Three hours a week of outdoor recreation is the amount of time considered adequate under state law, and inmates are unlikely to get more fresh air and exercise so long as the facility is overcrowded.

- Mealtimes would probably remain limited to 15 minutes, the minimum required by state law, even with a more manageable population. Feeding the more than 2,000 women takes two hours and two dining rooms, she explained, and because the mealtime is “a volatile time (with many inmates thrown together), even if we had just 500 women, we wouldn’t allow them to dawdle for 45 minutes.” What if someone can’t eat that fast? “Chronically slow eaters” are moved to a diet table that takes longer, Ashby said.

- Meals are planned by a nutritionist and cooked under the supervision of a culinary staff of 12, and special diets for diabetics and others with special needs are also provided, Ashby said. She said she gets few complaints about the food, but a reporter who sampled a lunch there recently found the turkey a la king to be mostly gristle and fat, the lettuce salad tough, the rice sticky, the Kool-Aid watery and the apple rotten.

- Medical care is provided by 28 full-time nurses, two physicians, a dentist, a nurse practitioner, an X-ray technician and a lab technician, Mulvihill said. The jail also has four full-time mental health counselors and two part-time psychiatrists. Most of the inmate complaints made to a reporter focused on the staff’s not taking symptoms seriously and providing little more than routine cold medication in a daily nurses’ line.

A recently released inmate--said by her attorney to have been held at Sybil Brand for nonpayment of traffic tickets--told The Times that she was mistreated while in custody during the hours immediately preceding the birth of her baby.

The 21-year-old woman said she was told to shut up when she tried to tell deputies that she was bleeding, that she was forced to submit to a painful strip search, that she was not allowed to telephone her family, and that she was chained or handcuffed to a bed during much of her 13 hours in custody, including while she was in labor. Sybil Brand officials deny that they have ever chained anyone in labor or childbirth.

(Under a settlement reached in a 1980 suit, the Sheriff’s Department agreed to end its policy of restraining pregnant inmates during labor and delivery.)

By most accounts, however, Sybil Brand Institute is no hellhole, although the problems of the relatively small and peaceful women’s jail are frequently ignored as the larger and more violent men’s jails and prisons hog the spotlight.

“If nobody is looking over their shoulder,” Smerling said of the lack of attention to the women’s jail, “things like court orders lose their force. Sybil Brand gets overlooked; the focus is on (men’s) Central Jail.

“It (Sybil Brand) is not as violent; it is as depressing.”